Hi folks, here is my latest work. I’ve been working on this for the last weeks, and I had fun making it. I hope you’ll enjoy it too.
(open the image in a new window/tab to see it full sized, it is 1920x1080)
Nice image. I like the concept and the general modeling is great. A few things to crit.
1 - I know puppets don’t always have moving mouths, but because the subject is just head I think it would come across better if there was a separate lower jaw piece to emphasize that it is a puppet.
2 - The wood texture is throwing this off. Most wood carvings would have a single direction grain - most likely from top to bottom. Here it appears you used a procedural material that results in numerous circular patterns through out.
3 - It also appears you used voronoi pattern to generate the “carve” look. While it looks OK, it still give the feel of computer generated.
The wood grain is great, the displacement should be more random and gouged though.
wow…Awesome…how you did skin like this
This is one of my favorite renders of yours, minoribus. I think the materials and lighting really shine. It must feel good to have finished it in such little time as well! I’m sure it can become laborious when a project stretches into weeks or months of work.
Thank you very much for your comments, guys. The crits are very helpful.
@Riptyde, the idea with a separate lower jaw piece is a good idea. I haven’t thought about that, but it would definitely be a good addition. And I see your point with the wood texture. The wood texture is applied by using object mapping and I controlled the orientation with a mapping node. At some point I had a more regular pattern like you suggested. But I must confess, that I found that a bit boring. So I changed it back to have the circular patterns you see now. Good point regarding realism, though. You are also right with the voronoi texture. I mixed two of them with different scalings. I wish there would be a possibility to soften the edges of the textures, with a blur node for example.
@NID Graphics, thank you. I tried to make it more random by mixing two voronoi textures. But perhaps there is a better solution.
@MortezaT.19, thank you also. For the head texture I used a wood image with high resolution combined with a procedural displacement. Here is the node setup for this.
Hey, James, you posted while I was writing my previous answer. Thanks a lot. I’m glad you like it 
Hi minoribus
Excellent work once again, the puppets are very expressive and for me there is a story being told beyond what you can see. I can visualize the old carpenter lovingly making these heads and sitting back on a chair he made admiring his handiwork.
The only thing that I can see that maybe needs to be fixed is that the wood shavings at the bottom of the main character seem to be floating, but also this is then nitpicking as it is a wonderful expressive image.
Well done.
Shaun
Edit: The DOF is also really well done.
Outstandingly executed and creatively unique minoribus. You’ve managed to give all the puppets kind of a unique personality. You got a nice mention here https://plus.google.com/+AdventuresInBlender/posts/fzeBRXFKUAm
